Kiddie Academy&REG;
of Renton, WA

Our Infant Care Curriculum: New Beginnings

Early childhood development is critically important. At Kiddie Academy,® our experienced teachers and staff help facilitate this period of learning, and that’s what separates us from traditional child care facilities.

Our New Beginnings curriculum develops and reinforces each infant’s individuality within a tight-knit community. Your child will be assigned a primary teacher to promote a deeper understanding of your child’s personality, likes and developmental needs.

Life Essentials® is Kiddie Academy’s proprietary developmentally appropriate curriculum and supporting programs, methods, activities and techniques help better prepare children for life. Life Essentials gives your child a happier, healthier, more well-rounded foundation for the future. In other words, what children learn at Kiddie Academy will help to prepare them for school and for life.

At Kiddie Academy, we understand that infants are constantly learning. Every time they hear a new sound, they want to know where the sound came from. When they look in a mirror, they want to know who is staring back at them. With our New Beginnings curriculum, infants learn these skills and many others throughout the day as they play and develop.

Kiddie Academy’s New Beginnings curriculum is designed to develop and reinforce each infant’s individual needs through Life Essentials. Children participate in sensory-based learning experiences while receiving positive, nurturing guidance from highly qualified teachers.

Areas of Development

The curriculum focuses on six areas of development: Cognitive, Communication, Emotional, Fine Motor, Gross Motor and Social Skills.

Cognitive Skills: Infants are building their memories, learning to develop words and learning to recognize familiar sounds. They’re exploring with their hands and mouths. In our infant room, your child will explore different textured materials, play Peek-A-Boo and complete simple wooden puzzles.

Communication Skills: By developing communication skills, infants learn how to express wants and needs to others. We understand the importance of our teachers constantly communicating with your child. Our teachers read books and poems, sing songs and teach your child how to put on finger plays.

Emotional Skills: Emotional development involves infants feeling safe in their environment and secure with the adults in their lives. We help your child build trust and attachments by watching your infant’s signals and responding to them. Our teachers hug, cradle and walk your child around the classroom while talking about everything they see.

Fine Motor Skills: Fine motor skills are developed in the small muscle groups like those in our fingers and hands. Our teachers help infants learn to grasp items and help them eat, color and complete other daily activities. We help improve pincer grasp by putting small foods in their hands, then on their tray, so they can feed themselves. They begin to wave hello and goodbye, and explore clay and other objects with their hands.

Gross Motor Skills: Gross motor development is the growth of the large muscle groups, like those in the legs and arms. Gross motor skills for infants include holding up their heads, rolling over, crawling and pulling themselves up. Kiddie Academy teachers speak encouraging words to help your child roll over. We provide your infant with plenty of tummy time, and our infants dance to different kinds of music and take walks around the academy, inside and out.

Social Skills: An infant’s social skills consist of smiling, making eye contact, imitating facial expressions and wanting to be close to other people. Kiddie Academy is a place where your child will see many different, yet consistent and familiar faces. Our teachers model good manners and proper social skills to your infant. Your child will travel around the academy to meet others—teachers and children—and will play near friends in her age-appropriate classroom to develop the early bonds of friendship.

At Kiddie Academy, STEM is integrated throughout our Life Essentials curriculum.

An infant experiences STEM learning through natural curiosity, readiness to repeat actions that have an interesting effect, and the need to explore and make sense of the world around them. Infants will have opportunities to make discoveries in the classroom and outdoors, use their whole bodies to explore and learn, manipulate objects to see how they work, and begin to develop vocabulary words related to STEM through books, songs, and finger plays.